I was convinced I was having panic attacks when a medical condition was blossoming inside of me, hindering my breathing.

Death was everywhere I went. I felt it and then as my birthday neared, I felt it press. I had a memory; a vision of me standing in the kitchen with my friend James. Me, covertly making a deal with God in my most deranged state. It was New Year’s 2016 going on 2017.

“I’ll live to 34.”

I pressed my hands to the cabinets and felt two hands press back.
James shook his head in disbelief.

“No, you’ll live longer.”
However, James also told me I needed an exorcism which didn’t help anything. I winked at the cabinet but as time went on, I sobered. It was like waking up as a giant tropical storm begins approaching. This whole time you were supposed to be planning evacuation and you just sat, entranced by the reflection and the centipede that appeared on your wall at times. The way I burned that altar three times.  I no longer enjoyed the feel of phantom legs running past me. There were two little dead girls in my house that pretended to be one. They held projectors and forecasted death like evening news reports. Sometimes I spent thirty minutes staring in the mirror trying to charm her into submission.

“You cannot leave the mirror, Catarina,” I would say. “But come closer.”
I could not get out fast enough.
“What is your name?”
We began like that.
“I could not get out fast enough.”


“the woman who walked out of walls

this next section is called

now, that I
have your attention

or

 
who to kill,
who to lay to rest,
and with whom do I finally
circle back?

I started listening to the birds that surrounded my house. I started listening  to God, myself, your radio station. I started listening to breezes even though there was a layer of mania to wade through. Lean in, Cat.  It’s not that I wanted to be dramatic. Let go, Cat. Its that I was by nature. Jump off the bridge, Cat. A bit theatrical.

I should have been an actress or a dancer. A performer. More than a mannequin, a mover. Now, I am eight weeks into a very psychotic manic episode calmly trying to stop myself from committing suicide daily. Jump off the bridge, Cat. You should know I am trying not to talk to you about it at the same time. You should know if I ever killed myself, I would always leap from something to conquer my fear of heights. You can fly, Cat.

I assumed this was purgatory.You’re in purgatory, Cat. I remember staring at the oval mirror and watching my face sort of melt and thinking, this is it. They are all in on the joke and I am the last one to know I am already dead. To jump off the bridge was to win. To show them I got it.  I got the joke. I was trying not to text you something that said

I know I am dead now. We don’t have to pretend.

Every day I walked across the bridge. Bold, I would lean over letting the cold wind hit my face or on my more infantile days, sort of scurry in and out of the bike lane as far from the railing as possible. It was cold. I took the gloves on and off and kept the straw tucked into my palm. At all times, I had to have the straw near.

“I’m gonna do it one day,” I let plumes of crystal linger in the air.
Lean over, Cat.
My hair was covered by a knit hat.
“One day I will do it.”
My fingers exposed and cracking. I brush the fingertip of a strange man.
Good girl, Cat!
“One day, I am gonna run into you again and jump off the bridge just to spite you.”
I began my way through the small center city crowd, going nowhere and freezing.

“datura moon”

The apartment kind of moved like a wave. A bruja would say “ a vibration.” You began to hear noises; check to see if it was the cat making them. You began to see slaughtered pigs at your bookshelf and the oven timer keeps going off in the middle of the night. You began to feel lethargic, take naps and wake up to apparitions in your doorway that kind of resemble Alex but also kind of resemble a human alligator. You hugged a small child at two am in your living room with no recognition of waking up or walking there. You began to chant his name. An upswing of movement takes over your legs; an endless urge to pace, to walk far. You began to wrap your body in layers and move things around; build shrines, hang postcards you had written to yourself like a map. The mother in you moves objects out of pathways for safety or tosses things over the bridge for luck: the coconut, the pearl necklace, the limpia leftovers. Your mouth keeps spilling his name and I love you and the euphoric laughter is the dead giveaway but life goes on. Fiddling, you shake. A nervousness begins.

You used to run around without a thought, numb, flask high. Once you ran to catch a plane but now you have a passport. You began the slow climb to the emperor, responsibility, flossing daily and making lists. The euphoric laughter should have been the dead giveaway. The endless spinning and baths or the way you told him I
can’t stop telling your friend I’m in love with him. You wore a red flag costume to the party but you maintained some composure during that time. Took some time off and a pay cut. Hugged yourself a lot. People really didn’t notice the muttering, the way you had to check things so often. You began to guess with 95% accuracy but hedged things to show effort. You were improving in your devolution. The night time became thick and mossy but during the day, you willed results; showed up early with coffee, felt responsible for your own volition. You showed up to the airport four hours early but ended up in Moscow anyway. These things really happened to you. Let go. These things all really happened.
Half has been burned the day your altar caught on fire for the third and last time but you still have the fortune from the cookie the flight attendant handed you:

“(Inscrutable?)”
I was awoken by Russian.
“Would you like a meal?” she repeated in English.

I had not planned to be on this Aeroflot flight on May 29th from Barcelona to JFK so I had not ordered a vegan meal. My meal had been eaten the day before by the famished traveler or curious Spanish tourist. Listless, probably actually starving, I decided to eat around the meat. I was only three hours in and trying not to count the full sixteen on my hand. I ate some spinach thing and a little cheese and a biscuit with butter, cheating. Who cares? I ate the fortune cookie last. I didn’t know Russians were so preternaturally oriented to include a chinese superstition but then again,  I was melting into the seams of my seat so maybe I was reading everyone wrong. It read
He who stands at the place, goes back.

You begin again without pettishness. You say thank you to everyone anyway, honestly, being raised that way. You begin again with a prescription and the same chant.
“These things really happened to me,” is the first thing you plan to tell him.

“datura moon

You  barely register the implication or previous trauma. Outside, it’s bright and you are now wearing your glasses again so you can see how hot the sun is today. You barely noticed the close calls–that bus that almost hit you, the way the tv fell into your face and left only a black eye, the time you got taken by a wave when you were seven. You feel your rib cage. I’m emaciating, an old voice says. Nothing is as good as being right tastes.
The grip on your phone has loosened. It has to. You are succumbing to some arthritic curling. Your hand becomes the claw. Like a crone’s wand, the straw is in your pocket but for how long? How long before you whip it out, began to lose yourself in the thin plastic, the repetition. I’m  emaciating.

“Ten pounds isn’t alarming for someone trying to lose weight but your thyroid is enlarged,” she placed her hand on the left side of my throat lightly.

And I walked to the ER when I was 24 years old because my throat was closing slowly but rapidly. I walked. When I got there, they said
“Your lymph nodes are swollen. Your sinuses have dripped downwards and created an infection and we are going to give you an injection to make swallowing easier, and then antibiotics to take orally.”
Suddenly I could have killed them all with my eyes alone.

“I’m referring you to get an ultrasound.”
When the ambulance took me to the hospital, I made the mistake of telling them I was anxious.
“And I want to get blood work done.”
When the ambulance took me to the hospital, I made the mistake of telling them sometimes I think I make things happen.
“And possibly an endoscope and swallow test.”
When the ambulance took me to the hospital, I said, “My throat is fine.I want to see a psychiatrist.”
“Your left tonsil is swollen too but I don’t think that’s causing the difficulty. I want the thyroid checked out.”

Years ago, I ran my car headfirst into a parked cement mixer breaking my sternum and experiencing my first major brain injury as I slammed my forehead into the steering wheel on impact. The seatbelt cracked my ribs when it tightened. When the cops arrived, I refused the breathalyzer and made the mistake of telling them
“My life is over.”
So I was put in a cell alone on suicide watch. I refused to get blood work done and they told me
“We won’t take you to the hospital then.”
My friend used the word misconduct to describe it.
“It was like a threat.”
I laid my head on that metal toilet, vomiting and dizzy, bruising up my chest. No one looked at me again. What festers unhealed, balloons.

“dysphagia” or “the act of naming things”

“120 pounds.”
“What?”
“You weigh 120 pounds.”

He wrote it down on a piece of paper, something with my real name on it and walked around me to get back to the computer.

“Is this scale accurate?”
I was still standing there, reading the numbers, squinting.
“Just calibrated,” he stated without looking at me.
The numbers had a bit of a halo around them. It was the light, my astigmatism, my vanity about it that made it hard to read.
“I’ve lost ten pounds in three months.”

He looked over at me without saying anything but I could tell that got his attention.  It got my attention. It wasn’t that I spit an apple into the palm of my hand mid chewing while walking down the street. It wasn’t the way I felt my teeth lock in place with the fistful of gesticulated bread near tonsils. It wasn’t the water stuck and lockjaw. It wasn’t the time in the woods when I massaged my jaw back open after trying to eat a snack, sore from talking to myself, from chewing. Or the two 911 calls in a year, the ambulance bills, the psychiatric referral. The way I felt the Caltrate lodge itself or the cherry pit plant. The way it hurt my wrists to type bolus or cyanide or amygdalin or the one I clung to globus hystericus. My pact with God to lose ten pounds without trying.

“Inexplicably,” I waved my hands in front of the mirror. “I lose ten pounds.”
Magic and mirrors are double edged swords. I’ve been trying to lose ten pounds since I was born.

“How tall are you?”
“I’m five seven,” I take one foot off the scale to put on my glasses.
He looked at me again.
“You look taller.”

“dysphagia” or “the act of naming things”

I once saw the future.

the whole future across my eyes
it is better to ruin this thing.

She returned only moments later with something clenched in her hand but he couldn’t see what it was from his position.  Tensing, he tried to keep quiet. He had begun to worry while she was out. Not just about the game but about his ankles and wrists, her skill, her motive. Was he trapped here? Without sight? He heard water being poured into the glass on the table. He felt the bed sink and the heat of her hips. He felt condensation press his lips, the bottom of the glass, the weight of her ferocity, demuring.

“We were at number three.”
She wasn’t letting him drink, merely rubbing the glass over his lips to cool the skin off, to tease the nerves.
“Story number three is a story you’ll remember.”

She set the glass back down without offering a drop. He could hear it drop suddenly had a vision of a pale blue circle being cut into the wooden table, ruining it.  His mother always reminded him to use a coaster. No matter where h e was going, she would pull at his collar, tell him you look handsome and pat his back.

“Always say thank you. Always flush and wash your hands. Always ask for a coaster,” she waved at him from the front door.

He suddenly couldn’t shake the vision of his mother there, dark skinned, petite, short and Indian. Him trudging to the unfamiliar neighbors. Him trudging to the birthday parties and her , smiling in her betrayal having abandoned many things to be there.

“It was last year. At the anonymous party.”
She stayed by his side and rested her hands on his chest. He didn’t say anything but she felt him tense.
“There was a woman there wasn’t there?”
He didn’t say anything.
“What did she call herself?”
He swallowed some more spit.
‘“She wanted to stop the game but you wouldn’t let her.”
She felt a tiny shake in  his torso as if he was chilly. Sneering, she got real close to his face and pinched his side.
“What was her name?”
It’s not that he cried visibly, just the shake of a body guilty, handcuffed, mortal and succumbing to the tipping scales.
“Say my name,” she hissed at his eardrum.

“Story number 3=13”

“if you don’t know your passion,
it confuses your mind,
not your heart.”

Acceptance by Jeff Vandermeer